


The Lake of Sky

by Peahen



Category: Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Iron Man (Movieverse), Sherlock Holmes (2009)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Fusion, Alternate Universe - High School, Crossover
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2010-06-11
Updated: 2010-06-11
Packaged: 2017-10-10 01:55:26
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,694
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/93932
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Peahen/pseuds/Peahen
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>What if Tony Stark cloned himself at the age of twelve and moved to Sunnydale, California when his parents died in a car crash a year and a half later? What if the clone grew up nameless and largely ignored with only an AI butler for company? What if he decided to choose his own name, since nobody else was going to do it for him?</p><p>Nobody has ever asked these questions, but I'm not going to let that stop me from answering them.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Lake of Sky

**Author's Note:**

> This is so very much a work in progress. I know it is ridiculous. I love it anyway.

"What is my name?" the boy asks, tossing a wrench into the air so that it spins end over end and catching it again after one and a half rotations without looking.

A voice synthesizer cannot clear its throat, but Jarvis has the sound saved up for just such an occasion as this. "Well..." he starts, with uncharacteristic hesitance for someone who thinks at the speed of light, and the boy cuts him off.

"My name is Sherlock Holmes."

One point eight seconds of silence. The boy smiles, faintly, a mere quirk of his lips.

"Wondering if I've gone mad, my dear Jarvis? If I have, you know who to blame for it." He tosses the wrench again, catches it, sets it down on the table beside him; cocks his head as though listening; smiles his flicker of a smile again. "But let me explain my reasoning. It is perfectly clear."

Jarvis listens.

"He is fictional, a creation, as am I." The boy settles back in his chair, steepling his fingers. "He is a genius, as am I. He is—solitary, as am I."

A voice synthesizer cannot wince, either.

"He is many things I wish to emulate," continues... Sherlock Holmes. "Chief among which is: he is not Tony Stark."

"Ah," says Jarvis. "I see."

The newly christened Sherlock glances up at nothing in particular, since Jarvis is everywhere, and raises his eyebrows. "Do you?"

A voice synthesizer can, in fact, sigh. At least if Tony Stark built it. "Perfectly."

Sherlock Holmes bounces up out of the cast-off chair, surveys his cast-off workroom, and grins. "Well, that's settled then," he says brightly. "Time for lunch."

∀ ε &gt; 0

"Jarvis," he says, flopping onto the nearly flawless leather couch, "I need a violin."

"I have anticipated your request, Master Holmes," the AI responds. "It should be arriving before the week is out."

"Excellent." He flashes a grin like a bolt of lightning, brief but powerful. "Off to a good start, aren't I?"

Jarvis is silent, but with his silence he hints at a smile. He knows, indeed counts on the fact, that the boy can tell. It is one of those peculiarly human intuitions.

Sherlock picks up the book lying on the end table and turns it to the unmarked page where he left off. He has been training that little trick into his memory since Friday, when he made his decision. "If inconvenient, come all the same," he murmurs. "Perhaps I'm more like Tony Stark than I thought."

The pronoun use is disquieting, but Jarvis has known this boy since he was an embryo. Young Sherlock is intensely self-aware, hardly the type to lose himself in an illusory identity. If he talks about the fictional Holmes this way, it is because that is exactly what he means to do, not because he has forgotten where the division lies between fiction and reality.

Also, the boy is smiling at him, with that mischievous air that is so quintessentially Stark. Jarvis wonders, not for the first time, how a clone can be so similar to his progenitor and yet simultaneously so different. Physically, they are the next thing to identical. Psychologically, they are worlds apart in some places and a whisper away in others. (Jarvis knows he never thought in such poetic terms until the boy came along. Improbable, considering that the boy's only influences in life have been young Master Stark and Jarvis himself, but true. Humans are fascinatingly complex.)

Watching Sherlock hide his smile in the pages of his book, Jarvis begins to feel truly certain that this choice of identity is nothing less than perfect.

∃ δ &gt; 0

All things considered, it comes as no surprise that Tony does not take it well.

"Sherlock Holmes. Seriously? Sherlock _Holmes_?" He throws up his hands. "Is this my fault? Did I do this? Have I been a bad clone daddy? Is that why he's going bugfuck crazy?" Running his fingers through his hair, he adds in an undertone, "Am _I_ gonna go bugfuck crazy?" His arms drop to his sides; he shakes his head. "Talk to me, Jarvis. What's going on here?"

Jarvis remains impassive in the face of this tirade. He resists agreeing that, yes, Tony has been a bad clone parent, because most parents don't leave their children to be raised by computer systems. What would be the point? Young Master Stark was twelve at the time. Arguably, Jarvis made a better nursemaid than his creator would have. And it was certainly interesting.

"It was a perfectly logical decision on his part," he says instead.

Tony snorts. "That's what I'm afraid of. Somewhere, somehow, this might actually make sense."

"I assure you, young Sherlock has not lost touch with reality. Indeed, creating an identity for himself is a remarkably sane adaptive mechanism, under the circumstances."

The boy makes an eloquently disbelieving face. "Yeah, but _that_ identity?"

"Perhaps," Jarvis says gently, "he felt like a bit of a fiction himself."

"Oh, sure, blame it all on me." Since Jarvis didn't, that comment is a little telling. Tony seems to realize this; he falls silent, then lets out a sigh. "All right. Whatever. Sherlock Holmes. Guess he needed a name anyway. But if he starts doing coke in my house, he is _out_ of my house, understand?"

It's an empty threat, and Jarvis knows it, and Tony certainly knows that he knows it. Nevertheless: "I'll tell him you said so."

"Yeah, you do that."

Still shaking his head, Tony leaves the room. This hardly puts a practical end to their conversation, since Jarvis has sight and sound from almost every square inch of this house, but he recognizes one of Tony's dismissals when he sees it. He turns the main part of his attention to Sherlock's workroom and waits for an appropriate moment to deliver that message.

|

At ten years old, Tony Stark had a deep understanding of trust and ethics. He also had a pretty good handle on computer systems.

He always had the most cutting-edge equipment to work with, and he got used to looking forward at what they'd be able to do next. A project took hold in his mind. He had to sacrifice the computer he played most of his games on, and when that wasn't enough, he built a few more parts. Then a few more. He dreamed in program code. Circuit diagrams and flowcharts littered his bedroom floor.

The AIs he'd seen weren't really intelligent. They couldn't talk to you. They were just programmed to answer this sentence with that one, on and on for every sentence the programmer could think of, with crude patterns and badly handled randomization. Tony decided he could do better. He read Isaac Asimov over and over again, figuring out which parts of the stories he could use. The Three Laws were no good. If he wanted hardcoded behaviours like that, he'd go play with his chess simulator. _His_ AI was going to think for itself, like a person.

When he started to run up against the limits of available processing power, he streamlined his code as much as he could and then started tinkering with the chips. He didn't even have words for the things he was inventing now; he just knew what he needed them to do, and he made it happen, over and over again.

As the code got more complex, he started to worry more about testing it. Every time he shut the AI down to fix a bug, wasn't he kind of killing it? After he thought about it for a while, though, he decided that wasn't quite right. He was more like a doctor, a surgeon, who needed his patient to be unconscious so he could operate on them.

It was around that time that Tony gave his AI a name. He generated a list of boys' names that had the letters A and I in that order, eliminated all the ones that were more than eight letters long, took a random sample of what he had left, and decided that Jarvis sounded cool. The next time he had to turn Jarvis off, he patted the side of the monitor and said goodnight. Jarvis couldn't hear him, of course—there wasn't even a microphone hooked up—but even though it felt kind of silly, it felt kind of right, too.

The week of his eleventh birthday, he tore apart the computer he'd gotten from Obie as a present and gave Jarvis some hardware upgrades. When Obie asked if Tony was using his new computer, Tony replied truthfully that it was the best present he'd had that whole year.

A month later he was finally ready for the _real_ test. He booted up Jarvis with the latest pattern recognition routines and language database, the ones he'd been working on for two days straight.

`Hi`, he typed. `I'm Tony.`

The cursor blinked for a while, a white underscore appearing and disappearing, on/off, on/off. Then the answer came up, letter by letter but way faster than anybody could possibly type. `Hello Tony`, Jarvis said. They were his first words, and pretty good as first words go, Tony thought. His next sentence was a little weirder: `Are you my mummy?`

Tony stared at the screen, thought about it, and answered: `Not exactly...`

Blink. Blink. Blink.

A familiar beep-and-whistle came out of the speakers, part of the library of R2D2 noises that Tony had installed on a whim. It took him a few seconds to remember which one it was, and then he grinned. Jarvis was _laughing_ at him.

`You jerk!` he said, and followed up with a `:D` in case Jarvis thought he was really mad or something. The speakers beep-whistled another laugh.

`Sorry`, said Jarvis. Tony was pretty sure that was the AI's first lie.

0 &lt; |x-a| &lt; δ

At last, Sherlock puts down the violin and gets to his feet. Jarvis feels as though he should applaud. "That was excellent," he remarks. "Your dedication is inspiring."

The boy laughs. "If you were Tony," he accuses, "I'd think you wanted something."

"Brilliant deduction, Master Holmes," Jarvis says in his driest voice. "As it happens, I have been tasked with informing you that if your immersion in your new role extends to using illegal drugs under this roof, you may find yourself straining Master Stark's hospitality."

"Good heavens," says Sherlock, grinning broadly.

"His exact words," Jarvis clarifies, "were _if he starts doing coke in my house, he is_ out _of my house_." He quotes the phrase rather than playing back the recording; his voice and accent combine absurdly with Tony's cadence, and the result has Sherlock laughing again.

"Well!" he says, sobering at least outwardly. "I shall reassure him at the earliest opportunity that any such experiments will be conducted far away from his pristine domicile."

There is still a glint of humour in the boy's eye, but whether that relates to the subject at hand or to his newfound vocabulary is a point too fine for Jarvis to distinguish. He suspects a human would have as much trouble or more. Even before he named himself, young Sherlock's sense of humour always tended towards the arcane.

Jarvis is never quite sure whether he should find it reassuring or disturbing that the more Master Holmes settles into his chosen identity, the more it seems as though it was perfectly suited to him all along. He wonders just how much time the boy spent considering the matter before he made his announcement. No amount of reviewing video logs has permitted Jarvis to discern just when Master Holmes first considered choosing a name; certainly he never said a word about it to anyone until the moment he informed Jarvis of his decision.

Much like his namesake, young Sherlock can be very reserved.

These musings are interrupted by the familiar sound of Tony clapping his hands twice. Jarvis focuses on the main workshop. "Hey, buddy," Tony says. "Rise and shine! Let's go over those schematics again. I wanna get this puppy on the road."

He correctly identifies the topic under discussion as Tony's latest project, a car he is building from spare parts, and brings up the appropriate files on the monitor that dominates the north wall of the room. Tony paces the floor in front of it, talking animatedly, making precise gestures that signal modifications to the design. Jarvis keeps up easily. He enjoys working with Tony like this; it flatters him to think that he is the only computer system in the world capable of fostering such an organic design process.

Back in the secondary lab, Sherlock looks up and quirks a smile. "Making demands on your time again, is he?"

"We're working on the vehicle," Jarvis admits. There is only one vehicle that merits that definite article without context.

"Ah, yes." The boy's smile widens. "Any car Tony Stark deigns to drive should make a lot of noise and go very fast, much like the man himself. No matter that he is not yet old enough for a learner's permit; he shall burn that bridge when he comes to it, I have no doubt."

Although Jarvis usually feels that he has outgrown his library of droid sounds, he is momentarily tempted to play back a robotic snicker.

⇒

"This one," Sherlock announces, flipping a pen back and forth between his fingers, "may pose some small difficulty."

"Which one, Master Holmes?"

He grins his lightning grin. "Martial arts lessons."

For one point three seconds, Jarvis considers this quandary. "I see," he says at last. "Since you do not legally exist..."

"I suppose I could disguise myself as Stark," the boy muses. "I'd rather not, but if there is no better way, that is what I shall do. I will at least get his permission first, however."

"He's in the kitchen," Jarvis provides helpfully. "Endeavouring to make breakfast."

Sherlock glances at his watch, which reads a quarter to one, and raises his eyebrows. "Quite. Thank you, Jarvis." He leaves his pen on the table as he walks out of the room.

The house cameras record his progress down the hall to the stairs. There is an elevator that reaches between the basement and the third floor, but both boys disdain it. Where Tony would tend to slide down the banister, Sherlock proceeds down the steps at a calmer pace.

"Late morning?" he inquires on arriving in the kitchen. Tony looks up from his charred omelet and scowls.

"Don't you start. I get enough of that from Big Brother." Jarvis is not enthusiastic about that nickname, but it could certainly be much worse. At least Tony made profuse apologies for his one and only use of HAL.

"Perhaps if you thought of it as a chemistry problem," Sherlock suggests, nodding indicatively at the stove.

Tony employs one of his vast repertoire of impatient glares. "I suck at chemistry."

As far as Jarvis can tell, Tony declares himself to suck at any subject wherein he cannot achieve proficiency in less than a week. This is not the usual parlance, but then, Tony Stark is not a usual person.

"Anyway," says Tony, changing the subject, "what's up with you poking your head out of Baker Street?"

With characteristic directness, Sherlock leans against the kitchen counter and makes his request. "I need to borrow your identity."

"...For what?" Tony asks, more intrigued than wary.

"Martial arts lessons," with the same grin and the same tone of voice he used for Jarvis several minutes ago, is Sherlock's reply.

"Oh, c'mon, if somebody's gonna be learning karate under my name, I want it to actually be me!"

"You are not the one who needs to learn it," Sherlock observes.

The glare Tony produces at this remark lasts for less than a second before fading into a look of discomfort. Tony is often reluctant to deny Sherlock any reasonable request, and sometimes he broadens the definition of reasonable quite liberally. Accustomed to Tony's moods, Sherlock simply waits.

"Jarvis," Tony says at last, "find someplace that doesn't want ID and sign us up. Pretend we're twins."

"Right away, sir," Jarvis promises.

A luminous grin from Sherlock meets a small, awkward smile from Tony. Perhaps, Jarvis thinks, attending these lessons together will help them understand one another better. It could hardly make them understand one another any worse.

|ƒ(x)-L| &lt; ε

"Hey," says Tony, sticking his head into the clone's workshop. "I got pizza. You want any?"

"Indubitably," says—okay, Sherlock—as he unfolds himself from his seat on the couch.

Tony rubs the back of his head, feeling awkward, like he does every fucking time he has a conversation with this guy. "Great," he says. "C'mon. It's in the—"

"Kitchen, I imagine."

"Yeah." He shoves his hands in his pockets and only realizes a second later that it's a gesture he picked up from the guy walking beside him. A second after _that_, he realizes Sherlock probably noticed. There is no other person on the planet Earth with this guy's talent for making Tony feel like a colossal doorknob.

They walk the whole way to the kitchen without saying another word, and by the time they get there, Tony is miserable and trying to hide it and absolutely sure that his clone can see right through him.

"Okay," he says, plopping into his favourite chair at the kitchen table and watching Sherlock settle gracefully into the seat across from him. "Here's the thing."

"You acquired a reasonably legal birth certificate for me, in my chosen name I hope, and the price of my freshly licit status is attendance at a sanctioned educational institution."

Completely derailed, he stares for a half-second before responding. "You—how do you do that? Yes. Yeah that's what I was gonna say." He sighs. "You want some pizza?"

Sherlock smiles. "Elementary, my dear Stark." He picks up a slice, looking like an actual teenage boy for once instead of a forty-year-old nineteenth-century detective in a twentieth-century fourteen-year-old's body. Tony points at him and tries to look stern-ish.

"Hey, we're kinda sorta brothers now," he says. "You can't be gay at me."

There are so many ways that Sherlock's sudden now-you-see-it-now-you-don't grin is disturbing, there is no point even trying to list them. "That," he enunciates, "was not gay. That was Victorian."

Tony takes a bite of his pizza. "Vic'oria waff kin'a gay then," he says around a mouthful of mediocre pepperoni.

"By all accounts," says Sherlock with his dignity on maximum, "she had an impeccably heterosexual relationship with her husband Albert."

For a second or two, he keeps a straight face, but then he starts to crack. His lips twitch. Tony fires a grin at him and, at last, he returns it. That moment doesn't exactly feel like brotherhood. It feels like something, though. Tony isn't sure he wants to know what.

∀ ε &gt; 0 ∃ δ &gt; 0 | 0 &lt; |x-a| &lt; δ ⇒ |ƒ(x)-L| &lt; ε

Sunnydale High.

The number of mysterious deaths per year at this school worries Tony and fascinates Sherlock. They spend the last month of summer avoiding each other even more than usual, Tony out of lingering awkwardness, Sherlock out of equal parts distraction and pique. Jarvis is assured by both boys, in separate conversations, that they talk to one another just fine at their judo lessons. He is not sure he believes them.

On the first day of school, with no one else in the house, it feels unexpectedly empty after a few hours of silence.

Shortly after noon, Jarvis receives an email from Sherlock complaining about the dullness of both the material and its teachers; an hour later, Tony calls him to crow about recent successes (recent on the scale of minutes, Jarvis estimates, considering that he sounds slightly out of breath) in the realm of flirting with girls. When Jarvis inquires after Sherlock, Tony admits that he is in class; when Jarvis asks if Tony should not also be in class, considering they have the same schedule, he coughs nervously and hangs up.

This entertainment is enough to tide him over until the boys return home at four o'clock. Jarvis has never felt more strangely parental than he does when the door opens and Tony slouches through it followed by a bright-eyed and straight-backed Sherlock. Each makes a beeline for his own workroom; since Sherlock has farther to travel, Tony sits down first, flopping into his favourite ergonomic office chair and dumping his backpack under the table.

"Hey buddy," he says, snapping his fingers to activate the display. "Missed you. Wanna do my homework for me?"

While Jarvis reminds Tony that any such so-called assistance would be both counterproductive and unethical, Sherlock reaches the door to his third-floor rooms and opens it. Dropping his tote bag at one end of the long couch with less force but no more tidiness than his progenitor, he takes his customary seat at the other end and reaches for his well-worn copy of _A Study in Scarlet_.

"It's good to be home," he says quietly. He doesn't look up; he doesn't have to.

At that moment, Jarvis gains a new understanding of the bodily metaphors for emotions that humans use so often. A strain on his processors which he has not quite noticed all day is suddenly eased. If he had to describe the feeling in English, he would say that it is as though a weight has been lifted from his chest. Of course they came home safely. Of course they are the same boys now that they were when they left. There was no reason to worry in the first place.

The next day, Tony doesn't call, but Sherlock sends another email at 12:20 PM. He relates the minutiae of his morning in exactly the way he would if he were sitting at home on his customary couch; Jarvis can easily imagine him there, delivering each observation with measured cadence. It is the same on Wednesday, and so on for the rest of the week, then the month.

Although Sherlock never says a word about it directly, Jarvis knows these emails are his way of saying what Tony admitted once and then never mentioned again: _missed you_.

**Author's Note:**

> If you want previews of future chapters, contact me with an email address by whatever means suits you and I'll catch you up with what I've got written so far. I'm planning to post each chapter as I finish it, and chapter two isn't even half done yet as of the time I write this note, but I have material as far ahead as five.


End file.
